Hispanic & Latinx American Literature

Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street is an internationally acclaimed novel, first published in 1984. The story of Esperanza Cordero is told through stunning vignettes that chronicle the life of a young Latina woman growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago. Heralded as an important voice in representing an underserved community, the novel won the American Book Award in 1985. It has since become an integral part of school curriculum across the country... Read The House on Mango Street Summary

Written by Luis Alberto Urrea in 2005, The Hummingbird’s Daughter is a fictional account of the life of Teresa Urrea, a woman whose mystical powers and religious fervor earned her the reputation of a living saint in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Luis Alberto Urrea is a distant cousin of Teresa and grew up hearing about her. He eventually researched her life through his family connections and the communities that she helped. The novel... Read The Hummingbird's Daughter Summary

... Read The Hungry Woman Summary

The Invention of Morel (La invención de Morel) is a 1940 novella by Argentinian writer Adolfo Bioy Casares. A literary thought experiment in the manner of Bioy Casares’s close friend, Jorge Luis Borges, The Invention of Morel imagines an island on which a group of wealthy socialites unknowingly relive a single weeklong holiday over and over again. They are observed by the novella’s narrator, a political criminal who has come to the island to hide from the Venezuelan... Read The Invention of Morel Summary

... Read The Island Within Summary

The Japanese Lover is Isabel Allende’s 18th novel. Like most of Allende’s work, it falls under the genres of magical realism and historical fiction. The novel was originally published in 2015, the year after Allende was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In addition to the overarching focus on romance and love, the novel addresses issues relating to World War II (WWII), Japanese American incarceration during the 1940s, racism, homophobia, and the struggles of aging... Read The Japanese Lover Summary

The Kingdom of This World, written by Alejo Carpentier and originally published in 1949, traces events in 20th-century Haiti, beginning in the French colonial period and spanning the lifetime of protagonist Ti Noël. This novella is a work of dark magical realism and tells the story of two attempted rebellions against the French, the eventual reign of King Henri Christophe, the nation’s first Black king, and his downfall. Through Ti Noël’s perspective, the novella shows... Read The Kingdom Of This World Summary

The Labyrinth of Solitude is a nine-part philosophical and historical essay on Mexican identity and culture. Octavio Paz, a famous Mexican poet and career diplomat, began writing The Labyrinth of Solitude during his time as the Mexican ambassador to France in the late 1940s. Originally published in 1951, the first edition of Paz’s work appeared in Spanish under the title El labertino de la soledad, and it is widely considered to be Paz’s masterpiece. This... Read The Labyrinth of Solitude Summary

The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail is a 2015 work of nonfiction and the winner of four awards, including the J.J. Staley Book Prize in 2018. Drawing on his expertise in anthropology, ethnography and archeology, author Jason De León, Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project and current Professor of Anthropology and Chicanx Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, critiques the federal border enforcement policy known as... Read The Land of Open Graves Summary

... Read The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica Summary

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Henry Holt and Company published Antonio Iturbe’s novel, The Librarian of Auschwitz, in America on September 18, 2012. Before the English Language version, Iturbe’s novel appeared in Spain as La bibliotecaria de Auschwitz. Antonio Iturbe is a Spanish journalist, writer, and professor who has taught postgraduate courses in journalism at universities in Madrid and Barcelona and is the President of the Association of Cultural Journalists of Catalonia. Iturbe wrote The Librarian of Auschwitz when he... Read The Librarian of Auschwitz Summary

“The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges is a short story that explores the search for meaning in life, the concept of the infinite, the power of knowledge, and the difference between the human and the divine. Borges is generally categorized as a Postmodern, metafictional, and experimental writer who played with the concept of narrative structure to critique the construction of reality. This work is firmly situated within the speculative fiction genre, weaving together... Read The Library of Babel Summary

The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantú is a work of literary nonfiction published in 2018. It was a New York Times best-seller, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Nonfiction Award, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Current Interest, and was named a Top 10 Book of 2018 by NPR and The Washington Post. The book combines memoir with history, anthropology, sociology, and psychology to... Read The Line Becomes a River Summary

The Living by Matt de la Peña is a young adult novel that is in equal parts thriller, adventure, coming-of-age story, and commentary on the social divides of race and class in American culture. The Living was published in 2013 and received the Pura Belpré Award, a US literary prize for young people’s literature that represents the Latino cultural experience. A sequel to The Living, called The Hunted, was published in 2015. Other works by... Read The Living Summary

The Lost Steps, first published in 1953 by Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, is a parody of the lost world novels that were popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912). The novel follows an unnamed New York City composer on a quest for Indigenous musical instruments in South America. Carpentier, known for his roles as a... Read The Lost Steps Summary

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The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986) by Ana Castillo is a series of nonchronological, fictional letters from a poet named Teresa to her friend Alicia, an artist. The letters describ1/10/20e their experiences through a decade of friendship, including the study abroad trip on which they meet, and a second trip they take together in Mexico.Castillo’s debut work, The Mixquiahuala Letters received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1987. It pays homage to Hopscotch... Read The Mixquiahuala Letters Summary

The Motorcycle Diaries is, as its title suggests, a record of a motorcycle journey, based on a diary by its author – a young Argentinian medical student – kept during the trip. What makes it remarkable isthat the young medical student who wrote it was Ernesto “Che” Guevara de la Serna, now known as a leader of the Cuban revolution, a guerrilla strategist, a Cuban government official, and a fomenter of revolution in the Congo... Read The Motorcycle Diaries Summary

... Read The Murmur of Bees Summary